TUNIS. Seated in the front row of one of the benches of the Assembly of People’s Representatives, Tunisian Interior Minister Kamel Feki has a serene face and is ready to answer questions from parliament on the migration situation in the country. It is July 27 and the focus of attention are the images from the border with Libya and Algeria, where for almost a month there have been mass deportations of the sub-Saharan population and Sudan. People who are arrested in Sfax, Tunisia’s second city and one of the main points of departure along the Mediterranean, and left to fend for themselves without water and food in military and inaccessible areas after being beaten or subjected to violence of any kind by the local security forces. The most recent reconstructions speak of 1,200 people expelled towards the Algerian and Libyan borders
Nicknamed Stalin at home only for a clear physical resemblance to the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the minister’s words are precise and punctual: «Those images are false. I say it and I repeat it because we have the proof. It was all fabricated upstream and the authors of those photos are monitored by audio and video ».
However, these are words that can easily be denied today. In collaboration with PlaceMarks, a project specialized in the research and analysis of satellite images, La Stampa has reconstructed what is happening on the border with Libya thanks to a series of photos dating back to 14 July. Two days before the signing of the one billion euro memorandum of understanding between Tunisia and the European Union in the presence of EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. In the same hours in which, in view of the July 16 visit to Tunis, the Brussels spokeswoman Dana Spinant stated that “the management of migrants must always be carried out in compliance with international law and human rights”.
The images speak for themselves. At least three makeshift camps can be seen, one of which appears to be built with an iron cage for fish farms, and a large gathering of people, at least 300, controlled on sight by some Tunisian and Libyan military means. A few hundred meters away, four other vehicles of the Tunisian border guard can be seen. Positioned along a ditch built between 2014 and 2018 to delimit the border even more clearly, one of these is equipped with a machine gun or a cannon. «From a historical analysis of the area it can be said that the scenario on the border between Tunisia and Libya is something completely new. The gatherings and camps did not exist before, while the presence of soldiers in patrolling order was never recorded in any of the available images, from 2006 to March 2023», explains Federico Monica of Placemarks.
From these snapshots, the testimonies of those who lived for days without water and food in that no-man’s land take on even more strength. A limbo accessible only to the Tunisian Red Cross, busy these days in picking up people to take them to other places in Tunisia. Other rescues were carried out by the so-called Libyan authorities, interested in showing the most welcoming face after numerous international complaints about the lack of respect for human rights.
They are testimonies that tell of migrants, students, workers, pregnant women, children and newborns who have been deprived of everything with violence; beaten by the authorities with iron clubs and sticks, loaded onto buses and thrown without answers towards Libya and Algeria. For those trying to return to Tunisia, tear gas and bullets awaited them. If the IOM and the UNHCR have issued a statement to urge action to protect these people, Brussels seems more focused on the numbers of migrants arriving from the small North African state.